The International Harold Pinter Society will be holding panel sessions at the University of Louisville’s Literature and Culture Conference on February 21-23, 2019. A staged reading of Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes will precede panels on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Martin McDonagh. The sessions will be entitled Triangulations: The Theatre of Beckett, Pinter, and McDonagh. Papers on the works of the individual authors or a combination are welcome. Send 250 word abstracts to Ann C. Hall, ann.hall by 1 September 2018. For more information about the U of L conference, see https://www.thelouisvilleconference.com/about.

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A two-day international conference at the University of Birmingham, UK

April 6-7 2018

Keynote Speaker: Steve Waters, playwright

Further speakers and guests to be announced

Call for Papers

The life and works of Harold Pinter, a pivotal figure in late twentieth-century British theatre, have been widely discussed, debated, and celebrated internationally. This engagement with Pinter has also been reflected in a worldwide ‘Pinter Industry’ in scholarship. In contrast to the focus of much critical work directly on Pinter’s theatrical outputs, ‘Staging Pinter: Networks, Collaborators, Legacies’ invites scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines to explore a broader series of networks that Pinter produced and engaged with, both as an artist and as a citizen. How do these networks serve to offer us insight into his activity and influence while alive, and how do they continue to reverberate to define his legacy?

‘Networks’ can be understood as an exchange of ideas or practices, or as a system of interconnected people, places, or works. Over five decades, Pinter’s work has traversed various forms and genres across theatre, film, television and radio drama, poetry, prose and political activism. Pinter’s work as an actor and director has also intersected with the work of other writers and artists across a series of venues and within different forms of media. What does an emphasis on the circulation of Pinter’s theatrical work reveal about key productions or texts? How can we better understand Pinter’s practice(s) through the networks of collaboration he established during his lifetime? By tracing the documentation and dissemination of Pinter’s life and work across archival, digital, scholarly, and performance networks, what new perspectives become possible?

This conference is the first in a series of academic and public events in connection with the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project. As such, we anticipate publishing either an edited collection or special issue based on the submissions to this conference. As well as work focused specifically on Pinter, we would welcome submissions exploring the work of other playwrights and theatre makers who may have been influenced by Pinter’s work and encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers.

While this conference focuses primarily on Pinter’s work for the stage and his theatrical legacy, there will be further opportunities to explore Pinter’s work specifically for television, film, and radio at the University of Reading in September in 2018 and later at the University of Leeds in 2019 to mark the conclusion of the project. We therefore look forward to welcoming scholars and practitioners to be a part of an ongoing, international conversation during the course of this project (please see the project description below for more details).

Possible Topics

Drawing on the project’s central research questions and objectives concerning patterns across productions of Pinter’s works, we invite 20 minute papers on all aspects of Pinter’s works for the stage, with an emphasis on the various figures, sites, and institutions involved in their production. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

Spatial Networks such as key performance sites (the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, for example) that Pinter’s work has occupied; touring practices or specific productions on tour

Collaborations with other writers, directors, and performers across Pinter’s career

Institutional Legacies exploring this impact of Pinter’s work on specific theatres, organisations, theatrical companies, or curriculum(s)

Global Networks such as international stagings, reception, or adaptation of Pinter’s work(s); Pinter in translation

Media Networks exploring how Pinter’s theatrical work interconnects with his work across film, television, and radio; the role of the media in the consolidation and dissemination of Pinter’s theatrical work and reputation

Political Networks and Social Activism exploring instances across Pinter’s career from the political drama of the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary politics

Digital/Archival Networks addressing the archiving and documentation of Pinter’s life and work; the online presence and dissemination of Pinter as a cultural figure

Stylistic and Aesthetic Legacies in the work of other theatre makers or in theatrical contexts

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies is led by Dr Mark Taylor-Batty from the School of English at the University of Leeds, with co-investigators Professor Jonathan Bignell (Reading) and Professor Graham Saunders (Birmingham). The project explores what performance aesthetics have been attached to Pinter’s work over the course of his career and what impact his work has had on the broader palette of British performance (stage and screen) history since the late 1950s.

A key outcome of the project will be the construction of a comprehensive, publically accessible database of professional UK productions (and broadcasts and film releases), which will be central to both mapping histories and scrutinising possible patterns across productions.

By generating new narratives of Pinter’s significance, which may validate or challenge those that sustain current scholarship or traditional scholarly perspectives, the project will offer a focus for developments in Pinter scholarship, and more broadly in theatre studies.

A production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 60 years after its less than successful premier at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958, has been announced. Ian Rickson, who directed Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape in 2006, is in the director’s seat, and the cast so far announced at Toby Jones (Stanley) Zoë Wanamaker as Meg and Stephen Mangan as Goldberg. Tickets went on sale at midday yesterday. http://www.thebirthdayparty.london/

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The UK project, Pinter Histories and Legacies: The Impact of Harold Pinter’s Work on the Development of British Stage and Screen, which is funded by a million pound grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has been up and running since January this year, but is beginning now to gain momentum with the employment of four research fellows. Led by Mark Taylor-Batty at the University of Leeds, the project now has a website at www.pinterlegacies.com, a twitter feed @pinterlegacies, and those who use Facebook can ‘like’ their page at https://www.facebook.com/pinterlegacies/ to receive updates in their streams. The core of the project will involve the construction of a database of every professional production, broadcast or screening of a Pinter work in the UK since 1957.

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The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council has just awarded funds for a million-pound research project on the work of Harold Pinter. The project will identify and assess every professional production in the UK of Pinter’s plays between 1957 and 2017, as well as his output on television, radio and film.

Led by Dr Mark Taylor-Batty (Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds), with co-investigators Professor Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading) and Professor Graham Saunders (University of Birmingham), and a team of full-time researchers and technical experts, the project will create a public database drawing on the Pinter archive at the British Library and other sources such as the BBC Written Archives and theatre and personal archives. The research will facilitate the construction of new appreciations of how Pinter’s work across media forms his distinctive voice, and the impact that his output has had.

Knowledge and information will be shared via website, blog, conference and published work, and also innovative formats of eBook, iBook and proposals for an interactive app concept. In 2018, the tenth anniversary of Pinter’s death, the British Film Institute (BFI) will present a curated season of screenings at BFI Southbank, in collaboration with the project team, to mark Pinter’s contribution to British screen culture. New investigations into his long-standing creative relationships with directors and performers will offer important insight into his impact upon contemporary practice on stage and screen.

International director, composer and Pulitzer Prize-nominee Christopher Martin (also Founding Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company where he directed nearly 100 productions) is set to direct a NYC revival of the Harold Pinter play OLD TIMES which will run November 25th thru December 11th at the ‘White Space’ at Alchemical Theatre Laboratory (104 West 14 St.).
Martin’s deliberately spare interpretation of the suspenseful Pinter drama will feature an international cast and comes 45 years after it was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1971 (which Martin saw). He received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his translation of the Heiner Müller text for Robert Wilson’s The Civil Wars.

In OLD TIMES, Anna visits her old friend, Kate, at the converted farmhouse she shares with her husband Deeley somewhere on the English coast. Anna has never met Deeley. Or has she? Twenty years have passed since the two women last saw one another, and rivalry between Anna and Deeley soon ignites a dangerous game of chess, the presumed prize being Kate. In this production, the setting is as minimalist as the language, in which silence plays an equal part. A large empty space with three windows and two armchairs; the dead leaves scattered across the floor are no more than the collective souvenirs of the past.

The cast is Philip O’Gorman from Ireland, Danielle Shimshoni from Israel & Katarina Vizina from Slovakia.

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